Request for Comments: libarchive, bsdtar

[Tim Robbins]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 09:31:49PM -0800, Tim Kientzle wrote:

> Request for Comments:  libarchive, bsdtar
> 
> PROPOSAL
> 
> Add "libarchive" to the tree, prepare to change the system
> tar command to "bsdtar" once it is sufficiently stable.
[...]
> Feedback and comments greatly appreciated,

Let me start by thanking you for working on replacing GNU utilities with
higher quality and less restrictively licensed alternatives. I haven't
had time to read over the code very thoroughly, but I have a few initial
comments:
- Padding gzip'd tar archives (with bsdtar czf) causes gzip to report
  "trailing garbage" and fail, and in turn this causes GNU tar to fail.
  BSD pax (-wzf) and GNU tar (czf) do not pad compressed archives.
- I would prefer it if compression was done by opening a pipe to gzip/bzip2
  instead of using libz/libbz2. This would make things simpler, and make it
  easier to support compress(1).
- I don't think the URL/libfetch support belongs in a library that deals
  with archives. Perhaps the interface could be changed so that the
  caller could pass a FILE * or a file descriptor instead of a filename.
- Filenames are too long :-)


Tim